Over the last 20 years, decolonial work has been central in creating spaces for critique, dissent and resistance in management and organization studies (see Prasad, 2003; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Faria, Ibarra-Colado, & Guedes, 2010; Mandiola, 2010; Nkomo, 2011; Mir & Mir, 2013; Yousfi, 2014; Gantman, Yousfi, & Alcadipani, 2015; Dar, 2018, Liu, 2018). This sizeable body of work has systematically raised questions about the role of, and dynamics created and perpetuated by, particular actors that centre Whiteness and colonial power resulting in persistent inequality, oppression, marginalization and invisibility of people of colour and First Nations people. Despite the transformational momentum generated by these discussions, inequality is sustained amidst discourses of disruption. Further, there is a seemingly newfound openness to decolonial work that suggests that it is now seen, embraced and used in diverse ways by scholars in both hegemonic and marginalized contexts (see Dar et al, 2018). The starting point of reflection for this sub-theme is: Where is decolonising work today, why is it so popular and is this popularity a strategy of co-optation that undermines its very purpose? This sub-theme continues with the tradition of discussions about decolonizing launched for the first time at the CMS Conference 2009 by the late Eduardo Ibarra Colado, as well as subsequent efforts at CMS and beyond that have continued to debate the dialectic relationship between decolonizing and recolonizing efforts.

As a political struggle that disrupts racist, classist, casteist, gendered, capitalist, ableist Supremacy, decoloniality is an unending project. As such, it is within the long duree that subjects embrace the Eurocentric illusionary discourse of individualist sovereignty propagated by Westernized institutions (e.g. the Neoliberal University), accepting their vulnerable positionality and engaging in an explicit and drawn-out encounter with White power. This involves a politics of struggle where they must not only be conscious of the complexity of their subject positioning, but use it in ways that draw on decolonizing concepts and practices to make theoretical advancements and develop methodologies for knowledge production that do not exploit or decimate Global South / indigenous knowledge, doing the work in-house (e.g. in their respective departments and universities) with a view of overthrowing systems that exploit Global South students and workers / students and workers of colour. This is a fundamental challenge for CMS decolonial scholars because it brings to the fore the tension emerging from becoming a vocal critic of the structures that legitimize their own subjectivity and value.

This sub-theme is interested in contributions on the following areas (please note this list is not exhaustive):

Intellectual openness and intellectual containment – There is a tension between the space decolonial work has as a lived position and the way it is seen just as a critique that needs to be legitimised for the sake of producing citations and citable work. What do these instances of legitimization look like? How do scholars deal with them? What strategies of containment keep these discussions on the margins in generative ways?

Recolonizing decolonial work – There have been some arguments and critiques that claim that decolonial discussions have been whitewashed and/or co-opted by capital. In what ways do we identify recolonization-decolonization dynamics? How is the decolonizing project co-opted by capital? What roles do scholars/practitioners at large from the GS and the GN have in the recolonization of strategies for liberation? Within the recolonizing dynamic, how can we meaningfully engage and distinguish between post-colonial and decolonial frameworks?

Mainstreaming and opening the decolonizing agenda – As decolonizing gains legitimacy in academic and institutional discourses, we must reflect on the role played by mainstreaming and openness/diversity in both fostering and undermining the radical politics of decolonial work. Is the decolonizing agenda being mainstreamed? What does it mean to open up decolonial work? Who is doing the work and whose multiple and interconnected interests-identities are being ultimately served?

White patronage – The relevance of patronage to the opening of spaces of legitimacy for intellectual labour cannot be overlooked. The role of white power brokers, networks and gatekeepers in the production, dissemination and valuing of decolonial work raises questions about the ways in which whiteness is re-centred through academic production from/about the GS. In what ways does white domination exert power over academic production? Which strategies (of co-optation, violence, influence) are used to maintain white hegemony in academia?

Celebrating the legacy of Eduardo Ibarra Colado

This stream will apply a liberation politics that will include a ‘walking-collective’ practice called: “Walking with Brown Folk”. The format seeks to disrupt the practice of centralizing knowledge in panels / experts that limits the possibilities for a dialectic engagement.

Abstract submissions

Please submit a 500 word abstract (excluding references) one page, Word document NOT PDF, single spaced, no header, footers or track changes) together with your contact information: name, institutional affiliation (independent scholar if not currently affiliated) and email to decolonizingalliance @ protonmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is Thursday 31st January 2019. We will notify you a decision by the end of February.

]]>http://blog.helenaliu.com/2019/01/15/call-for-abstracts-problematising-the-recolonisation-of-decolonial-scholar-activism/feed/074Call for Abstracts: Decolonising Work and Organisationshttp://blog.helenaliu.com/2017/08/14/call-for-abstracts-decolonising-work-and-organisations/
http://blog.helenaliu.com/2017/08/14/call-for-abstracts-decolonising-work-and-organisations/#respondMon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:41 +0000http://blog.helenaliu.com/?p=71 ...]]>Dear comrades, please join us for fun and solidarity at the Gender, Work and Organization conference in Sydney, 13-16th June, 2018.Despite the ways in which our lives are profoundly gendered and racialised, organisational theorising has traditionally assumed a white Western male norm in its attendant ontological and epistemological stances (Grimes, 2001; Liu, 2016; Metcalfe & Woodhams, 2012; Nkomo, 1992; Nkomo & Al Ariss, 2014). Mainstream research of organisations and their members tend to focus on the perspectives and experiences of white male subjects in the Global North, whose worldviews and experiences are assumed to be universal.

When mainstream studies are focused on gender, women tend to be treated as variations on the ‘default,’ with the assumption that the findings are applicable only to/for women. Similarly, studies frequently treat non-white subjects as special, ‘exotic’ cases, while reproducing homogenising and stereotypical representations of them (Kwek, 2003; Narayan, 2000). In essence, the gendered, racialised ‘Other’ is a material and epistemic transgression of normalised white male bodies in organisations. Much of organisational theorising and research does not address the foundational assumptions upon which the field was based, and continues to proliferate.

The silencing of gender and race in organisation studies are not just research ‘gaps’ to be filled. While theorisations of gender have given us the language and understanding to speak of multiple and fluid gendered identities (Harding, Ford, & Fotaki, 2012; Knights, 2014; Knights & Kerfoot, 2004), our field has yet to develop equally nuanced engagements with race (Parker, 2005; Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop, & Nkomo, 2010). Under globalisation and capitalism, gender and race along with other intersectional relations bear the hallmarks of Western colonialism, which too often remain invisible and unquestioned (Alamgir & Cairns, 2015; Nkomo, 2011; Özkazanç- Pan, 2012).

Within this context, intersectionality has become an oft-deployed concept, almost celebratory in nature, mimicking the language of diversity but devoid of significant theorising on the relations of power and oppression in organisations (Mohanty, 2013). In contrast, we want to reclaim the analyses and approaches available from an intersectional framework to address the silences in organisational theorising. We are interested in giving voice to ideas that examine how relations of gender and race can exemplify differences in power, status and legitimacy in organisational contexts and beyond. Our goal is not necessarily emancipatory knowledge for/about the ‘Third World/two-thirds world’, but rather, we aim to address the ways in which oppressions takes shape in the epistemic, material, and social world in which we inhabit and write about in organisation studies (Metcalfe & Woodhams, 2012).

Promising approaches to decolonial theorising have emerged at the nexus of feminism, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Although these diverse fields are typically treated as separate entities in organisational research, their cross-disciplinarity has fostered intellectual movements under various names including decolonial feminism, multiracial feminism and anti-racist feminism. While its proponents speak from different standpoints, they collectively seek to identify and challenge the intersecting systems of white supremacy and neo-/colonialism alongside ongoing challenges to patriarchy (Narayan & Harding, 2000; Parry, 2004; Swarr & Nagar, 2010). Together, these movements raise the voices of ‘outsiders’ to become producers of knowledge in order to undo the epistemic violence (Spivak, 2012) of white, Western masculinist theorising (Loomba, 2007).

This stream aims to advance the conversation of how organisation theorising could embrace a more meaningful engagement with the intersections of gender and race. We invite submissions that offer conceptual and empirical insights from researchers of all levels, intellectual backgrounds and identifications/identities. We also welcome submissions written ‘differently’—beyond the confines of traditional academic paper structures—and in languages other than English. Submissions may include but not limited to themes such as:

Intersectionality and feminism, including the various movements of decolonial, multiracial, anti-racist, transnational and women of colour feminisms.

Critical interrogations of whiteness, such as theorisations of how it may be redone or undone.

How racial and/or colonial dynamics of power impact organisations and their members.

Engaging with the politics of representation, such as via critical collaborative projects of knowledge production (Mir, Calás, & Smircich, 1995).

Indigenous feminist scholarship and practices in ‘post-colonial’ (McClintock, 1992) regions such as Australia, South America and beyond for exploring the epistemology of trans-local feminist movements.

Challenges of researching gender and race in the white masculinist academy.

Submission of abstracts (max. 500 words) by 5pm on Wednesday, 1 November (AEST)
To submit, go to: www.mq.edu.au/events/gwosydney
For stream enquiries please contact: Helena Liu helena.liu@uts.edu.au
Papers from the stream will be selected for a special issue proposal of the Gender, Work and Organization journal.

The conference ran across three days immediately before my annual pilgrimage to the European Group for Organization Studies Colloquium, held in Copenhagen this year. My joint submission with Dr Helena Heizmann to EGOS had already been accepted, and attending both would be a logistical feat to present in Liverpool then leave the conference early in the afternoon to take a train to Manchester and fly from Manchester to Copenhagen in the evening. We would arrive at our hotel just before midnight, but be set to start EGOS in earnest from 9am the next day.

I was reluctant to commit to this marathon, but when the enticing streams were released on the CMS website, Helena encouraged us to give it our best shot.

I submitted two papers to CMS. The first was to The Future of Feminisms and CMS stream with Fahreen Alamgir, Alison Pullen, Sheena J. Vachhani, Melissa Fisher, Banu Ozkazanc-Pan and Deborah Jones, based on my recent book chapter published in the latest volume of Dialogues in Critical Management Studies, where queer and feminist theorists debate the future of CMS. My chapter, ‘Redeeming difference in CMS through anti-racist feminisms’, critiques how we popularly conduct critical research.

The critical management scholar is one who is called to adventure through an innate commitment to social justice that sees him courageously dispelling the evil forces in our society before returning triumphantly to share his wisdom with his homeland. Sadly, his heroic narrative is frequently tragic where despite the critical management scholar’s superior intellect, he is confronted with naysayers from The Mainstream. He battles mightily against his unjust treatment in business schools to fulfil his noble quest to speak truth to power.

In love with our own emplotment as tragic heroes, we can sometimes lose sight of our own power and privilege as producers of knowledge. A lack of reflexivity in our practice emerges through the assumption of whiteness as universal and the tendency to speak for, rather than with, subdominant groups.

I explore a potential antidote to our unreflexive practices of power in anti-racist feminisms (Mirchandani and Butler, 2006; Mohanty, 2003). Anti-racist feminisms acknowledge the diverse interests, standpoints and intellectual traditions of Black, Indigenous, Latina/Chicana and Asian feminisms, but embrace a collective political interest in interrogating the interlocking systems of gender, racial and imperial power. Although each of these traditions speaks from different positions and with different voices, their combined politics point to the ways diversity can be meaningfully embraced in the future of CMS practice.

Practising anti-racist feminist CMS requires us to disrupt white power in our theorising. The invisible dominance of whiteness is continually reinforced when it remains unnamed in our research, so that racialised subjects may be singled out as “black managers” or “Asian managers”, while white managers get to just be “managers”. Our racial grammar (Bonilla-Silva, 2012) may register the explicit naming of hegemonic identity categories as awkward or unnecessarily cumbersome. However, it may be more accurate and informative to state, “this is a study of how white middle-class able-bodied self-identified heterosexual cis-male managers demonstrate inclusivity towards white middle-class able-bodied self-identified heterosexual cis-female employees” than it may be to describe such research as “this study explores how managers practice gender inclusivity.” The universality (and indeed, grandiosity) of the latter is diminished when the racial, class, dis/ability and heteronormative blindness is redressed.

Gender and racial power continue to be reinforced when critical management scholars fail to acknowledge the ways gender and race inform our standpoints as producers of knowledge. Entrenched in colonial ideology, the act of speaking for another social group to which we do not belong and of which we have no experience is not only academically acceptable within CMS, but sometimes problematically rewarded.

There should absolutely be a place for theorisations from the ‘outside’, but when scholarship is embedded in historical structures of racial power as it is, scholars of colour who write about our own racial groups are often seen as doing self-absorbed niche research, while white scholars who write about people of colour are more likely to be seen as heroic saviours.

Where such studies have not engaged with anti-racist feminist thinking in their analysis, the findings frequently rest on stereotypes of people of colour. Even within self-proclaimed ‘critical’, ‘emancipatory’ papers, white supremacist and colonialist fantasies permeate the interpretations drawn. For instance, I have read papers expounding the value of Indigenous managers by perpetuating the ‘noble savage’ myth, maintaining that Indigenous cultures are more attuned with nature. Others celebrate traditional Chinese philosophies of Daoism and Confucianism, painting Orientalist images of Chinese cultures as romantically ancient and arcane.

In many of these examples, actual non-white people (Indigenous and Chinese managers) are sidelined so that their commodified cultures can be appropriated to spice up white scholarship and managerial practice.

The various white supremacist and patriarchal tendencies explored above cannot be essentialistically attributed to straight white male critical management scholars. It is ingrained in our habitus. Engaging with anti-racist feminisms offers one way forward to disrupt our reproduction of white power towards a redemptive engagement with difference.

I’m not so free to discuss my second paper presentation as it is currently under review, but it’s one of the most rewarding pieces I have written this year about the processes of leadership theory production. I was especially honoured to share this paper with the fabulous people in the Critical Studies of Leadership stream with Doris Schedlitzki, Pasi Ahonen, Neil Sutherland, Hugo Gaggiotti and Paresh Wankhade and humbled that it was awarded best paper by Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, a journal I have admired for a long time.

]]>http://blog.helenaliu.com/2017/07/31/cms-2017/feed/069ISLC 2016http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/12/25/islc-2016/
http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/12/25/islc-2016/#respondSat, 24 Dec 2016 23:00:31 +0000http://blog.helenaliu.com/?p=68 ...]]>In the dark winter of 2016, I visited the Gothic fairy tale city of Edinburgh to present at the International Studying Leadership Conference (ISLC).

The conference was in many ways a humbling experience. I heard wonderful things about the conference from past attendees, but my path getting there was rough.

I was first accepted to it in 2011 in the final year of my PhD when it was held at Lund, but the travel funding provided by my university left me too much out of pocket to afford it. I tried again in 2015 when it was held in Lancaster, but my flight booking was lost by the travel agent and I had to withdraw.

Accepted for the third time at a third institution, I had never been more determined to attend a conference, or die trying, than ISLC.

I have a great relationship with its associated journal, Leadership. I have reviewed for the journal a couple of times and published three papers there with three different editors: my first critical race examination of leadership; my first conceptual piece on reimagining ethical leadership; and an analysis of the social construction of crisis combining media data from my PhD with interviews I conducted with Australian banking executives. This last paper was co-edited by the organiser of the ISLC in Edinburgh.

I was a wallflower for the first morning, time-travelling as the PhD student accepted to the conference in 2011. I had a stubborn ‘early career academic’ mindset and passively waited for more senior scholars to come and approach me. But as my doctorate was marked by the generosity and inclusivity of other academics who struck up conversations with me at international conferences and made every effort to make me feel welcome, I realised I could spend my time more valuably extending that hospitality to the other junior scholars there.

I presented a work-in-progress on a case of a self-identified Asian male senior manager in Australia. It applied intersectionality theory to explore the attempts of the senior manager to practise ‘servant leadership’. Servant leaders are defined as self-sacrificing individuals who invariably put the needs of others before their own and foster an empowering, developmental climate around their followers (Greenleaf, 1977). Although servant leadership has laudably attempted to challenge popular individualist notions of leadership by introducing values of humility and compassion, the construct largely remains blind to dynamics of power in leadership practice.

In my conference paper, I attempted to demonstrate that Australia’s history of racism has constructed Asian immigrants as natural servants so that their endeavours towards servant leadership are more readily seen as their appropriate deference to white employees, rather than heroic acts of leadership.

The presentation of this paper was also kindly supported by the University of Essex Business School who invited me to present it at their campus in Wivenhoe after the ISLC. (The final version of this paper, ‘Just the servant: An intersectional critique of servant leadership’, has as of July 2017 been accepted into the Journal of Business Ethics.)

ISLC itself left me with warm memories of reconnecting with old friends, meeting doctoral candidates who enlivened my hopes for the future of leadership studies and not least of all, Edinburgh. Many of the ideas there surprised me with their parochial Britishness. This is not in itself problematic, yet a lingering colonial approach to research stained many of the studies presented there. I was greatly saddened to hear a funded study of leadership in an Asian context that applied all Western theoretical frameworks designed by white British men. It concluded that the Asian managers were unable to deal with paradox while denying their agency and voice in the process. Colonialism is alive and well in the practices of “epistemic violence” (Spivak, 2012, p. 287) in leadership scholarship.

References

Greenleaf, R.K. (1977). Servant leader: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. New York: Paulist Press.

]]>http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/12/25/islc-2016/feed/067Honeymoon and Burnouthttp://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/10/01/honeymoon-and-burnout/
http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/10/01/honeymoon-and-burnout/#respondSat, 01 Oct 2016 06:55:09 +0000http://blog.helenaliu.com/?p=63 ...]]>In late January, I started a new role back in Sydney.

Everything about it seemed perfect: I was given my own office; my relocation was seamless; IT systems were up and running well before my start date; induction sessions were comprehensive; and the resources and support for researching and teaching seemed endless. I was in the depths of the honeymoon period.

Nine months on and reality has admittedly tarnished this rose-coloured painting. I still have moments of starry-eyed awe where a professional staff member says, “You know we can help you with that [bureaucratic exercise], right?” or someone points out, “You know you get paid extra for that [seemingly thankless task], right?” But for the most part I move about my day with healthy cynicism and circumspection about my professional possibilities.

This new mindset followed a pretty serious crash from the height of my honeymoon.

Fuelled by the pure excitement of the new job, I threw myself headlong into every aspect of it. I started developing my three new subjects on the evenings and weekends of the last two months of my last job; alongside packing up my Melbourne home and office, putting my apartment on the rental market, and saying my farewells to local friends.

I failed to balance the late evening teaching schedules of my new university with my enchantment with my new office, where I’d come into work every morning at 8am and inevitably became sick with fatigue as 6–9pm classes dragged out into 50hr work weeks.

As soon as the semester ended, my body gave up on me. I came down with the worst flu I have experienced in six years that knocked me out for two weeks. I paid for every late night and early morning in the two weeks I spent in bed, with virtually no energy to talk or eat. It was the kind of sore, aching wake up call I needed to see that the way I was working was unsustainable.

So now in my second semester I am learning to slow down.

I spend more mornings sleeping in and reading in bed. I learnt to use my husband’s film camera and have been taking photographs on my walks in the winter sun. Like a hipster.

I have been playing Stardew Valley and Starbound. It reminds me that there are more meaningful things in life than chasing A* publications and teaching citations. Like unlocking the ability to plant starfruit and finding an eyeball biome on a new planet.

They are all just games after all.

]]>http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/10/01/honeymoon-and-burnout/feed/063EGOS 2016http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/07/31/egos-2016/
http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/07/31/egos-2016/#respondSat, 30 Jul 2016 23:00:49 +0000http://blog.helenaliu.com/?p=61Visual story of my conference and holiday in Italy…
]]>http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/07/31/egos-2016/feed/061How to Promote Women in Leadership?http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/06/04/how-to-promote-women-in-leadership/
http://blog.helenaliu.com/2016/06/04/how-to-promote-women-in-leadership/#respondSat, 04 Jun 2016 02:00:44 +0000http://blog.helenaliu.com/?p=59 ...]]>Organisations frequently talk about addressing the lack of women in senior positions, but does the rhetoric lead to effective solutions?

I was asked to comment on the question: “What’s the most powerful action you’ve seen to promote women into leadership roles?” by INTHEBLACK. My response was featured alongside Libby Lyons, Director of the Workplace, Gender Equality Agency, and John Lydon, Managing partner of McKinsey Australia & New Zealand.

Seeing women as more than just their gender is the first step toward gender equality in leadership.

We can assemble a flurry of diversity management initiatives, development opportunities, progressive CEOs, quotas and good intentions, and see them fail because we ignored the ideological reality that men remain the leadership norm.

When leaders are by default men, women become treated as special cases. We impose outdated stereotypes that women are, by nature, more caring, gentle and nurturing and then set them up to fail when they inevitably have to make tough calls at the helm of their companies.

Recognising women as more than just their gender does not mean turning a blind eye to sexism at work. Sexism frustrates the ambitions of women at every stage of their lives and careers. Traditional gender roles are taught to our children from the toys they’re given. Gendered assumptions of skills mean girls are less likely to be engaged in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] at school. Bias against female students is woven deep into the cultures of business schools.

By the time women get into organisations, they are accustomed to believing they don’t belong. For women, after all their socialisation, to aspire to leadership is a political act. It’s ideological resistance against the taken-for-granted assumption that leadership belongs to men.

Women don’t need special treatment to be promoted into leadership roles. The most powerful and radical action we can take to support their leadership is to see them as full human beings.

For others, travel is also about experiencing different and ‘exotic’ cultures, perhaps wandering beyond the resorts to mingle with locals and feeling a little more worldly in the process.

A much less common conception of tourism is as a neocolonial practice. Holding firm to promised fantasies of faraway lands, many of us go and return, blissfully ignorant of the ways in which we contribute to the destruction, exploitation and degradation of those countries and their peoples.

In her essay, ‘“Lovely hula hands”: Corporate tourism and the prostitution of Hawaiian culture’, Hawaiian intellectual Haunani-Kay Trask (1991, p. 14) closes with the injunction: ‘If you are thinking of visiting my homeland, please do not. We do not want or need any more tourists, and we certainly do not like them’.

For Trask, tourism is the cause of the mass commercialisation of Hawai’i, economic oppression of the industry’s workers, and destruction of the natural environment. Many go to Hawai’i blindly chasing a commodified fantasy of the ‘Island Paradise’, yet as Trask (1999, p. 61) describes, ‘when they leave, tourists have learned nothing of our people and our place’.

Similarly, our colonial forebearers had little interest in the native peoples who owned the lands that they occupied. In records from India in 1843, an English woman was asked what she had seen of the country and the natives since she had been in India: ‘Oh nothing’ , the lady answered, ‘Thank goodness, I know nothing at all about them, nor do I wish to, really; I think the less one sees and knows of them, the better!’ (Maitland, 1843, p. 53 in Ghose, 1998, p. 1).

When modern day tourism is seen within the context of historical colonialism, it becomes easier to empathise with even the most anti-tourism sentiments like those expressed by Trask.

But contemporary life is one of contradiction.

Many of us find it impossible to avoid travel in an increasingly globalised world. It is also unrealistic for me to believe that a few zealous individuals burning our passport in self-sacrificial anti-colonial resistance will halt neocolonialism and reverse all the trauma and violence of historical colonialism.

In these spaces of contradiction, I believe it is the necessary to search for alternative ways of ‘doing tourism’. We are in desperate need of radical reflection in innovating ways of travelling that are as fun and relaxing as they are ethical and respectful.

References

Ghose, I. (1998). Women travellers in colonial India: The power of the female gaze. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Trask, H.-K. (1999). From a native daughter: Colonialism and sovereignty in Hawai?i. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

]]>http://blog.helenaliu.com/2015/12/18/tourism-in-a-postcolonial-age/feed/057Returning Homehttp://blog.helenaliu.com/2015/11/27/returning-home/
http://blog.helenaliu.com/2015/11/27/returning-home/#commentsFri, 27 Nov 2015 05:11:24 +0000http://blog.helenaliu.com/?p=55 ...]]>I’ve longed for home more than ever in this past year.

As hard as I fell for Melbourne, the romance predictably wore off once our relationship settled into a routine. I spent as much of my non-teaching time as I could in Sydney; stealing away for long weekends for simple joys like catching the entire Bell Shakespeare season and staying up late to have Korean fried chicken with Benian.

I turned 30 at the start of the month during a time when I became acutely aware of how important family was to me. Two friends I have known since I was 12 are expecting a baby in December. Two people close to me lost their fathers; both left the world suddenly and too soon. Every time I boarded a plane back to Melbourne, my hermitical work life — despite its considerable rewards — grew colder.

In August, I started to look for a new job that would bring Benian and I together again. I didn’t want to get his hopes up and told only a single friend in Sydney that the university I have admired for years — her alma mater — was hiring. I finally broke the news to Benian when I was short-listed, who was only more pleased when I was eventually made an offer three weeks ago.

I’m now preparing to move back to Sydney to start my new job at the University of Technology Sydney in January, and looking to the future with great optimism for what it’ll bring.

I’m excited for new collaborations, inspirations and projects. I want to continue my theorisations of race in organisations as well as put the wheels in motion to conduct a more ambitious project with a social enterprise I’ve admired for a long time now.

But perhaps more than anything, I’m grateful that I’ll be able to see my husband everyday again. We can have dinner on the same table, cuddle with our cat, and play coop without having to use microphone headsets. I’m grateful that I’ll be there when my friends’ son arrives, and that I can see my dad and talk about the TV shows he’s binge-watching over his home-made steamed buns.

Despite claims that we’ve entered a post-heroic paradigm in leadership research (Bryman, 2004), the romance of leadership is seemingly enduring. When the ethical scandals of high-profile leaders at Enron, Worldcom and Tyco proliferated through the media in the last decade, leadership theories responded with ever more heroic constructs of leaders as authentic, spiritual and wise. Such conceptualisations of leadership reinforce the common perception of leadership as essentialised within a charismatic individual located at the top of a hierarchy. Context and power are ignored in favour of universalistic models that assume the right set of competencies when activated correctly will invariably produce desirable organisational outcomes. Consequently, existing leadership theories too often reproduce masculinist Western-centric elite class models of leadership while marginalising discussions of equality and social justice.

In a society, where leadership has reached canonical status, the application of critical theory to leadership theory is welcome. Western joins important voices in this area to answer the call with his clear and accessible examination of leadership from a critical lens first in 2008, and now follows with a restructured second edition that includes extended discussions and two new chapters on Leadership and Culture (Chapter 6) and Eco-Leadership (Chapter 12). The new edition clarifies its purpose by dividing into two parts. Part 1 deconstructs mainstream leadership theories and their tendency to reduce the phenomenon to simplified formulations. Part 2 addresses the oft-cited criticism of deconstruction as critique without alternatives and reconstructs leadership by offering a new discourse for ethical, sustainable leadership practice and development.

Leadership: A Critical Text begins by laying down the impetus for critical leadership theory, grounded in a review of critical theory and critical management studies. Western confronts the popular criticism of critical theory as elitist and divorced from practice and argues that critical leadership studies need to engage with practitioners. His commitment to this aim remains a key strength of this readily digestible book.

Chapter 2 follows with an overview of leadership, speaking with refreshing clarity about the limitations of the literature, including the reductionistic entity perspectives of trait and neocharismatic theories, the simplistic treatments of context as fixed in contingency theories and the instrumental ways in which more recent theories around humility and spirituality have been applied to leadership.

While the psychological orientation of the book offers rich insights into the psychosocial dynamics of leadership, it is comparatively light on the sociological aspects of leadership. The deep examinations of race-ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and age that stand as vital contributions of the critical management tradition which readers of Organization would be familiar with are not a focus in this book. For example, the use of splitting and projection to explain our seeming ‘deep longing and desire for leadership’ (p. 26) overlooks a gendered analysis of the way in which relationships based on unequal power and domination are institutionalised and romanticised in our patriarchal society. Focussing on ‘natural’ cognitive mechanisms misses the opportunity to subvert patriarchal norms of domination and discuss how leadership might ‘engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive’ (hooks, 1996: 122).

Chapter 3 opens with a content analysis of a piece of text about Vladimir Lenin from Leon Trotsky’s unfinished work, The Class, the Party and the Leadership, to show how Lenin and the Soviet Revolution were described varyingly as intellectual, unconscious, group, distributed, individual, mass and symbolic leadership. Although Western concludes that this case demonstrates the plural nature of leadership, the easy application of forms of leadership to the text also reflects the growing tendency of academic and popular discourses to define everything as ‘leadership’ (Alvesson and Spicer, 2012; Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003).

The book then moves into a review of dictators and despots and opens the debate about the necessity for leaders. Western shares Grint’s (2010) scepticism of the viability and sustainability of ‘leaderless’ movements and articulates instead the case for non-oppressive forms of leadership. The chapter provides a fascinating account of the rejection of traditional forms of hierarchical leadership with cases of ‘autonomist’ leadership, including the Quaker movement, and new social movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy resistances that exhibit egalitarian and democratic ideals.

Chapter 5 advocates the need for leadership to embrace diversity and foster inclusiveness. The incisive critique of mainstream leadership theories is sustained through this chapter with the unapologetic deconstruction of essentialism and denaturalisation of whiteness. Despite the considerable strengths of this chapter, its brief overview of diversity could have been enriched by drawing on feminist, queer, post-colonial and critical race theories. For example, critical whiteness theory may help explain the ‘rainbow-washing’ (p. 103) trend where diversity and inclusiveness continue to be treated as what white leaders do to others. Critical leadership scholars who already embrace these perspectives have demonstrated the potential for leadership to be egalitarian and emancipatory when they centred their research on leaders who sit outside the white elite class male archetype (see Bruni et al., 2004; Parker, 2002, 2005).

The new Chapter 6 in this second edition on leadership and organisational culture is one of the most cogent contributions of this book. It challenges the simplistic conceptualisation of culture in existing literature as something leaders control and argues instead for a more nuanced understanding of culture as something in which all organisational members are entwined. Western draws on the metaphor of an ‘avatar’ (p. 111) to capture the mutually constitutive relationship leaders have with their cultures. In speaking to the role that leaders play in shaping the organisational culture, Western offers the provocative idea that leaders have the capacity to lead a resistance against hegemonic corporate and social cultures. An elaboration of this idea can be found in Pullen and Rhodes’ (2014) recent piece in this journal, which articulates an ethicopolitics of resistance.

Chapter 7 offers a comprehensive discussion of religious fundamentalism, showing how themes of messianic leadership, belief in absolute truth and intolerance of difference have similarities within totalising corporate cultures. It lays down the context that later explains the rise of heroic leadership theories that Western labels the Messiah Discourse (Chapter 11), and yet makes the case that fundamentalist, totalising cultures are ultimately unsustainable because they breed employee cynicism, conformity and misjudgement.

The second part of the book then begins its reconstruction of leadership with an overview of four dominant discourses in Western leadership theory. The argument is that since the early 20th century, four key themes have risen to prominence that reflect and shape shifting ideas of leadership. Each of the discourses is thought not to have usurped the last, rather, remnants of each discourse remain in contemporary organisations, with some industries and organisational contexts showing a predilection for particular discourses.

The first of these is the controller leadership discourse. Grounded in scientific management and rationalism, human and non-human resources are often treated as tools to be controlled in order to
maximise the productivity and efficiency of the organisation. The Therapist leadership discourse is then said to have emerged from the 1940s influenced by the rise of post-Freudian psychology and individualism. Therapist leadership emphasises autonomy, cooperation and well-being, but productivity and economic growth remain the fundamental objectives. The 1980s then observed the rise of the Messiah leadership discourse where leaders are heralded as charismatic, heroic characters who inspire and motivate via their vision. Echoing the arguments of Chapter 7, Western draws parallels between messianic, transformational leaders and cults, but suggests the individual character and agency of leaders should not be dismissed entirely despite the over-romanticisation of Messiah leadership.

Having presented the three historically grounded themes of leadership, Western introduces what might be better described as his reimagination of leadership for the 21st century, which draws on the concepts and methods of systems thinking, network analysis, and environmental sustainability. This chapter challenges us to rethink the corporate pursuits of value, growth and purpose (which are almost always economic measures at the expense of all others) and proposes a redefinition of leadership that exhibits qualities of connectivity, ethics, spirit and belonging. Western strives to keep the argument practical and presents business cases where aspects of Eco-leadership can be observed. Chapter 14 extends the Eco-leadership vision and proposes an innovative approach to how Eco-leadership could be developed, inspired by the principles of monastic formation and cleverly synthesises individual, collective and environmental aspects of leadership.

Although I have also argued for the relevance of systems thinking to the theorising, development and practice of leadership as an inherently relational process in my work, I have, of late, been concerned with the masculinist, White and elite class influences on this discourse. Systems thinking and network analysis have tended to be constructed as new techno-rational ways to measure and control complexity, while recent gendered analyses of sustainability have exposed the ways sustainability leadership is dominated by men’s voices that continue to preserve the socio-political status quo (Marshall, 2011; Phillips, 2014). Accordingly, the literature around systemic and sustainability leadership has not yet been developed to the extent that it can convincingly promise the set of benefits outlined in pages 266–267 of Western’s book, including brand protection, efficiency savings, organisational belonging, community engagement, diversity and inclusion, just to name a few. However, some of the most promising aspects of this reimagination of leadership have been developed in more gender equal ways in Uhl-Bien’s (2006) work on relational leadership and Painter-Morland’s (2006, 2008) work on leadership and accountability.

The Controller, Therapist, Messiah and Eco-leadership discourses are compellingly presented; however, the book seems to be committed to an idea that this ‘model’ needs to be generalisable. Contrasting with the more nuanced analyses provided throughout the book, we are encouraged in Chapter 13 to assess our own preferences for particular discourses and apply the model to our own organisational contexts. In striking similarity to the contingency leadership theories of the 1960s–1970s, the summary of the four discourses are broken down into their respective strengths and weaknesses as well as which situations each would be more or less useful (pp. 294–97). This seems to me to conflict with the lessons learnt from discourse analysis that focusses on the local processes by which meaning comes into being rather than their ability to generalise across contexts (Fairhurst and Uhl-Bien, 2012). I remain uneasy about the references to the model’s application to other cultures, including observations of how Asian and Chinese students easily recognise the Controller and Messiah themes but have trouble identifying Therapist and Eco-leadership themes (p. 154) and that the Middle East and China appear to strongly exhibit Controller leadership (p. 293). The expansive application of Western-centric models of leadership onto other cultures closes down the opportunity to learn from alternative practices of leadership and ultimately reproduces existing stereotypes of people of colour.

Overall, this book demonstrates the enormous contributions that a critical approach can make to leadership, and boldly steps beyond the limitations of critical leadership theory by offering practitioner-engaged insights and guidance in an accessible form. By doing so, it also highlights the challenges in making a critical approach to leadership user-friendly to leaders and their coaches, as what remains in demand in Western capitalist organisations (simplicity, universality, predictability) is often inimical to the ethical, transgressive and emancipatory agenda of critical leadership studies.